


Maker's Mark

by katajainen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blacksmith Thorin, But let's not kid ourselves - this is sad af, Canon Compliant, Canon-compliant angst, Canon-compliant character death (mentioned), Grief/Mourning, Hope, M/M, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 20:09:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8547448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katajainen/pseuds/katajainen
Summary: Memories have a way of resurfacing. It is surprising how little it sometimes takes to jolt one's mind into remembering. Into feeling what was and had been.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [at my tumblr](https://katajainen.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Mind the tags: canon-compliant.

The wind picks up and shifts, driving dry leaves before it, along the lane and up the hill, right down to the doorstep where it deposits the crackling pile of red and gold at Bilbo’s feet. The hobbit looks at them, turns one bright red leaf – hawthorn – over with his toe and sighs. The bench by his door is getting too cold to sit on; and his pipe has long gone out. What he needs is a cup of tea.

He’s handled the kettle countless times before; it had been his mother’s after all, the one she had brought back from one of her journeys years before Bilbo had even been born. The bottom half is permanently stained by soot from camp-fires and there is a dent right below the spout, but it is the perfect size. There is, after all, only one of him in the big sprawling smial. There is a reason why the big kettle stands gathering dust in the cupboard. (‘The tea is at four.’ Bilbo hears himself say. ‘Don’t bother knocking.’) He shakes his head and sets the kettle on stovetop. As he does so, his fingers pass over small irregular patch behind the handle.

The clang is loud in the empty kitchen as BIlbo jerks his hand off sharp enough to send the kettle rattling. He leans on the stove railing and stares at his mother’s old traveling kettle like he has never seen it in his life. As if it has turned into something impossible at the flick of his hand. Into a spider poised for a jump. Into a live dragon egg. Into a shape of angular lines burned into the skin of his fingertips that’s but a memory now and will remain so for the rest of his days.

His curiosity (or his desperation) eventually gets the better of him, and he lifts the kettle from the stove. Cold water sloshes from the spout and onto his feet as he tilts the back up to catch the pale light from the window.

The mark is half-covered under a layer of soot, and Bilbo rubs it with a handkerchief for a while before giving up. He closes his eyes instead and lets his fingertips wander over the cold blackened iron, his skin remembering the lines of a stamp he first learned to read in a night-time darkness under an open sky. Briefly he wonders why his mother never mentioned the kettle being of Dwarven make – only to realize that maybe she had mentioned, but _he_ had forgotten, that maybe it had not mattered to him the way the place she had bought it from had. After all, you could jot a dot on the map (and Bilbo had been so fond of his maps those days) some ways south of Bree – ‘three days on the Greenway’ – and mark it down as ‘a village of Big People’. You wouldn’t write ‘that Dwarven smith who had such nice handy kettles when I got tired of having one with only half the spout’ or ‘the Dwarven smith with the fiercest scowl you ever did see – you would think he was not in the business of selling his wares at all’ or even ‘the Dwarven smith the name of–’

There is a bang, and a crack Bilbo would later realize was a flag meeting its match in cast iron slipping from nerveless fingers. The puddle on the floor soaks cold through the knees of his trousers, but his hands are empty useless fists on the cold wet stone, and he feels it but cares not, the same way he had felt the ice under the both of them, the wind sharp enough to freeze the tears clean off his face.

His fingers remember the pattern they had idly traced in the darkness under the stars, in the warm soft glow of a pot-bellied stove in a house on stilts over a lake slowly freezing over. A pattern chiseled and stamped on beads. Beads woven into a fall of black hair, silver streaks catching russet and gold from the firelight. If he closes his eyes he can still feel his fingers sinking into the heavy wealth of it, and if he inhales deep he can still catch the iron-smoke-dust-sweat smell of the road. His breath comes in loud dry ragged gasps that serve nothing to fill the black pit of his chest, empty of tears that will not come anymore.

* * * *

 For years afterwards he boils his tea water in the big kettle, and his mother’s traveling kettle gathers dust at the back of the cupboard. There is a new dent an inch left to the old one.

Then comes a morning, bright with sunlight, the sky the sharp steely blue of a well-honed blade. Bilbo sets the old kettle with its soot-blackened bottom firmly on stovetop and finds a wistful smile on his face. He looks it over as the water boils, the strange sharp practical angle of the spout, the old dent and the new one, and resolves to get some of the soot off at least. A maker’s mark deserves to be seen. He remembers hands then, hands that could be hard as the iron they had worked, but that knew gentleness too, and the smile is lost, turned into a small sad puff of a sigh.

Bilbo takes his tea out in the garden and up the hill over Bag End. The oak sapling is easily three times his height now, and really past being called a sapling, he reckons. There is a spot beside the young tree where the morning sun warms the grass just so, and Bilbo settles down to sip his tea. Maybe he ought to put a bench here too, he thinks as he squints in the piercing September sun. It would be nice, he decides, to sit up here with a cup of tea or a pipe of leaf.

Bilbo closes his eyes, and the inside of his lids blazes a vivid crimson. He does not believe in ghosts; there’s that much of respectable left in him after all. But if one side of him feels a tad warmer than the other for a moment, and if his nose can just make out a whiff of the iron-smoke-dust-sweat smell that was of the road – well, it does a heart good to dream for a spell.


End file.
